When things are different

I decided, about a week or 10 days into Lent, to give up soda and candy.  Somehow during the past year or so I’d gotten to be kind of attached to soda and candy especially chocolate.  I think I mentioned all this in one of my letters.  I was hoping to come out of Lent different somehow.  I figured if nothing else I’d be different around the middle, however I was not noticing any change of any sort and the temptation for both soda and candy was powerful – I wasn’t sure I’d make it and I was starting to wonder if it was worth it because it just didn’t seem to be working the way I’d hoped.

My friend Bob encouraged me to stick with it and assured me that once I got to the other side of this fast I’d look back on it and see how good it had been for me and how I’d changed as I suffered through this self-denial.  Well, Bob, I’m there and I’m not.  I’m the same guy I was when I started out and while I continue my fast it has been very difficult.

Lent ended and I was going to have some of the Grands here on Easter Sunday so I bought some candy, you know malted milk ball eggs, jelly beans, and pastel colored M&Ms.  I also bought a box of 12 Russell Stover chocolate covered eggs.  I put a mix of this stuff in a candy dish and set it out and the kids worked it over.  I had to apologize to my daughter for fighting with one of the boys over red jelly beans.  And nobody really noticed how I was working my way around the soda cans sitting around the house and emptying each one but I never did really open one and anyway it was Easter.   In the days that followed I polished off the leftover candy.

I really want to do something about the weight I’ve gained in the past six or seven years and I would like to come to terms with food – with how much I eat – but I’m not having much luck.

Nothing fits me anymore and it had been a long time since I bought any new clothes.  The size I used to be just was not a good fit anymore but I really didn’t want to buy clothes that fit because I knew where that would end up – pretty soon they wouldn’t fit anymore either.  However I was getting to feel kind of ragged about how things looked so I went into J.C. Penny to get some new stuff but not real expensive stuff so I wouldn’t feel so bad when in my head it all got to be to big for me.  I told the clerk I wanted some shirts that fit.  He measured me up and rummaged around a little and handed me a package.  I didn’t even look at the size I just picked out three new ones and bought them.  The pants were a little easier I got the “comfort” waste line – it stretches 3 inches.  I picked out two pairs and went home.  The next day I had a funeral so I got out the new duds thinking I’d look pretty good in my new stuff.  My gosh this seems a lot of fabric is what I thought when I took my new shirt out of the package.  Holy cow! This is like a tarp as I put it on and the grommets around the tail kind of reinforced my sense of LARGE.  It fits I guess but I feel like I’m wearing a table cloth.

The other day I was messing around outside it was wet and I needed to come into the house and get something but I didn’t really want to take my shoes off I just wanted to run in get what I needed and get back out.  “I’ll just take a look at the bottoms of my shoes”, I thought.  Except I couldn’t find a way to bend around that allowed me to see the bottom of my shoes.  I went through all sorts of cataleptics trying to see what was on them – it made me kind of light headed – and was afraid I’d beach myself.

I know I’m not as flexible as I used to be and I should do some more exercise but what I really need to stop doing so many fork curls each day.  I eat twice a day or maybe I graze for about eight hours a day with a little break for work in between there somewhere.  Take yesterday for example.  I got home from church about 1 in the afternoon and I had a couple hot dogs for lunch with a glass of orange juice – there is 110 calories in an 8 oz. serving of o.j.  So I had two.  Next I took a little snooze.  When I woke up I took a walk to work up an appetite for dinner – it was about 3 in the afternoon.  I got back to the house about 4:15 and cleaned up the kitchen and put the dishes away and got all squared away and ready to start dinner.  I got out a chicken and got it ready for the grill, peeled about half a bag of carrots and washed a potato.  I started the grill going and it was close to 5 when I got everything outside and ready for the grill.  That is when I decided I needed a little something to munch on while I waited for dinner.  Getting all this food ready is hungry work so I opened a bag of taco chips, a jar of salsa and got some cheese out.  About an hour later dinner was ready and the bag of chips was empty, crumpled up alongside an empty jar of salsa.  I wasn’t really that hungry anymore but I had this good dinner all ready now so I polished off one breast the carrots and a potato.  I topped everything off with a dish of ice cream before bed.

The other day some guy was talking about how we, people in the U.S. keep getting bigger, wider and how it’s really getting to be a problem.  Well, one thing he said was that by age 60 we’ve lost half our taste buds.  I guess I’ve noticed that and my solution is simple.  Eat twice as much – I’m doing my part.  Sssssssssssssssss – Opps I hate when that happens - crumbs get between the keys and make them stick sometimes.

I went to the doctor the other day for a routine look under the hood.  I have to go every six months because of a pill I take.  The first thing they do is check your weight.  I did real well with everything except that damn scale.  I was one pound heaver then the last time I was in there – so tell me Bob how am I different?

I’ve been giving my girth some serious consideration and I have a plan.  Starting soon I’m going to take just half of what I normally would.  Starting soon but not tonight I’ve got a pizza in the oven and it’s just about ready.

Keep Lookin Up – but don’t lose your bearings

Bill

Mother’s Day

I have four daughters.

I have four granddaughters.

My mother is Rosemary.

Betty is the mother of our children.

My mother had a mother as did my father.  They would be my grandmothers I knew one and not the other but that doesn’t change anything and I could keep going back and back one after the other and after a long time we would return to the garden, to the first mother, to the beginning of all things.

Grace stood beside my chair and looked into my eyes.  There are wisps of blond hair in her face that she brushes aside with a little six year old hand so that I am looking right into those big blue eyes, she lost a tooth this week and I see where it used to be as she looks at me and says in a small voice, “I miss my mommy”.  “Oh, don’t be sad Gracie”, I say, “mommy will be home in just a minute and she will be happy to see you”, I tell her. 

It’s only a moment, just a crumb of time, at the beginning of a day that will be filled with things like this, little nothing moments that pile up and turn into a whole day as he sun works its way across the sky and before we know it the dark comes and we will be saying “goodnight, sweet Grace”.  But in this moment I’m looking at Grace and I see her and I think about the other granddaughters and they are here now in my head as I look at Grace and I see their moms, my own daughters as well.  I see the little faces that they were so long ago and I see the mothers they have become and how can all this pass through my head without thinking of Betty.  How is it that all these images, these thoughts, crowd into these few words brought on by “I miss my mommy”? 

Every little girl is a tabernacle.  I remember when Betty looked at me with her own blue eyes and announced that we would have a baby.  That she would be a mommy.  It started there as a thought so abstract I could not understand except to know that this woman before me looking at me with that light in her eyes was precious to me in a way I never imagined anything could be.  I would be a father, we were having a baby and it was alive and growing inside Betty.  My Betty.  Baby girls, sweet baby girls, little girls who are so happy to see you, who learn who you are and call you daddy and you never knew before how much you wanted to be a daddy, little hands on your face, little fingers in your mouth, little arms around your neck, little hugs, as you watch little girls turn into young women and turn into mommies with their own little kids.  As I watched these moments, as I lived these moments, that turn into hours and days and weeks and months and years but you only live them one moment at a time, one present, one right now at a time, and as you do, as they do – pile up into lifetimes, as I watched them grow what I came to understand is that each little girl is a tabernacle. 

Perhaps we understand this best in Mary the mother of Jesus.  She is referred to in lots of symbolic ways like Ark of the Covenant or House of Gold and stuff like that and when we listen to those titles she is given and think about them we can sense a little of Mary as tabernacle.  But we have to apply that same thinking to our own mothers as well as life comes to us through them.

“Do you think you’ll be a mommy someday”? I’ve asked my little girls.  Yes, maybe, I hope so and I get all sorts of answers but I can’t recall anyone saying no.  When I met Betty she was thinking more than a little bit about becoming a nun and so I guess she was thinking that she might not ever be a mother.  She was a good mother I think.  I look at my little granddaughters and wonder if they will have their own babies but only time will tell.  Good mothers are good women before they become mothers and I guess that is what I should want for them that they be good virtuous women first and then perhaps they will be mommies.

So on this weekend we remember our mothers.  We remember those women in our lives who loved us and cared for us and gave themselves to us and we should take a moment to thank God for all that they have given us.  I want to remember that it is not good mothers who make good women but rather it is good women who make good mothers.  Father, from my own conception you have surrounded me with good and loving women.  A mother who gave me home here on earth and made me at home with you.  And you filled my life with good women who have cared for me and helped me all throughout my life.  Bless them this day I pray.  Bless my daughters the mothers of our grandchildren.  Bless my granddaughters today, Abby, Ashlan, Grace and Becky that they might grow up to be good and holy women and perhaps mothers of their own children.

Keep lookin up

Bill

It’s quiet here now. That’s not right it’s almost never quiet here but now the sounds are different. The wind I hear the wind – Whoosh ……Whoosh….whooshing through the grass. Away in the sky is a small plane rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr on its way somewhere. Red wing blackbird’s twilllling as they move across the field out the window. I can hear Jays, bluebirds, robins, song sparrows, brown thrushes and other birds whose songs I know but whose names I don’t. Quiet here now lots of sounds but none of the sounds that filled this house for the last three days.

I walk through the house and their signs are everywhere. Like the tracks I see on the trails around my place. Dolls, doll clothes, baby stuff around the porch and in the great room where the little girls played. Cars are everywhere, on counters, in the bathtub, under the beds, lined up on the coffee table, all over suggesting that a whole herd of little boys might have worked their way through here. I’ve been picking Lego guys up all day, or parts of Lego guys, it is unusual to see Kyle or Ethan without either a Lego guy or a car in their hands. Sometimes they have two cars, sometimes two Lego guys and if they have one they will not trade for a different one but then for some reason I can’t get they will drop the one they have for a different one.

So far I’ve found a ball glove, a ball, a bat, a bike and a bike helmet scattered around the yard outside. Back inside the house I’ve found odd socks, a pair of shorts, a tee shirt and some underwear. No shoes this time – so far. I wander through the house and pick stuff up except sometimes I leave something lay because it’s sort of like they are still here then. My head is full of the sounds and sights of the weekend and I think it’s too quiet now.

Jenny and here boys came on Friday. Sometimes she comes but Blake, her husband, is unable to because of work things, but this time they were all here. All the kids came out here on Friday evening and all the Grands except Connor who was at a sleep over. It is a calliope of noise and confetti of activity. I’m getting better about what happens to the house I think but the kids are all getting better about picking up to. It is non-stop activity until all of a sudden everybody is asleep and so you sleep for a little and then it starts all over again for another day. I’m not sure we could do this for a week at a time. There is and this was especially true this weekend very little crying.

It’s so emotional for me. I just have to take a walk or something it just overwhelms me – it just fills me up – it’s almost too much. They are noisy and rambunctious and silly and I watch them and think about how I love them and think about Betty and what a good mother she was and all our lives, our marriage is here in the house with us and I want to talk about that a little. It seems to me that the past we lived comes into the present on a weekend like this. We worked hard and for a long time as for most of us there were a lot of days, one after another, one year following another, when we just scraped by just one disaster away from the poor house. Providing for a family is hard work for a husband and wife. We never looked back though; we never regretted the life we had been given – we always felt blessed. We loved our children. We always considered the kids as a sign and as symbols of both the love we shared and God’s love for us. Gifts, our children were gifts of love, the love we shared and the love God shared with us. We did not live for our children though, don’t misunderstand me we would walk in fire for our children but our marriage was not about the kids it was about our love for each other. I remember when we realized that the most important thing about being married was helping each other live a life that would lead us to heaven. Betty certainly gave me that and I think I helped here to in her quest for salvation. Those things those ideas anchored us, those ideas, our marriage vows and our faith were the foundations of our lives and our marriage. You don’t always remember that each day as you struggle along – because sometimes it’s so hard just keeping together and keeping bread on the table but it is always there. And we weren’t always as good at it as we could have been because we didn’t always make it the priority it should have been I suppose but it was always there I think. I think when we have those kinds of blessing at the heart of your marriage you live that each day even when it doesn’t seem to being going to well and think your children learn to live that because that is what you teach them – just in living each day.

I sit with a cup of coffee and watch them the kids and Grands and I am overcome with how I love them – how we love them, Betty and I, even now when she is in heaven I just can’t feel that she is ever far from me – and I see how the past is present. These children, the grandchildren, have moms and dads that love them. I watch them and see in them, how they love each other, how Betty and I loved each other.

I was watching Abby she is the oldest at 11 and is changing. The little girl that she was is certainly still there but the young woman she is going to be is starting to show up now. So I was watching her and this is what came to me as I watched her. I could see Abby in this midst of all this family stuff and it was like I was seeing all her days, her whole past, the little baby her parents brought to this family and how she has grown up to now to this present moment with us, she is present here but her past is present as well, she has learned things from us – from each of us that have shaped her and will, or have become part of her – without her even being aware of what was happening. And not only that but, and this is kind of strange in how it happened, as I watched her with the other kids I saw the Abby who will be the young woman I’m waiting for her to become and who will probably be a mommy someday with her own children and it was like, seems like as she stands here among us, as she is here with us she is already teaching her children because she will take this present with her into her future.

I don’t know if any of this is possible without faith. I suppose we can pass a lot of living on to our children but it is faith that gives us the anchor that I think is such a gift in my family. I want to say they make me proud of who they are – how they love each other – and I am but more than that I am humbled by all this. Well that’s the news from the Briar Patch.

Keep Lookin Up

Bill

Friday night.

This week is over.  Tomorrow is Saturday, the weekend and then Sunday, Sunday is still the weekend but at the same time it’s not on Sunday the weekend is about over.  Sunday stands alone but this is Friday evening.

It’s gotten colder all day.  The wind is right out of the east and gusting to about 20 I’d guess.  The sky is grey.  The color of slate and the wind drives some low clouds scudding across it.  There is thunder occasionally and now and then the rain scours the windows.  The furnace is turned off; I’m trying to decide if I want to turn it on, and its chilly here on the porch.  I have the windows closed, or mostly closed, not latched so the wind whistles as it finds a little space between the sashes.  It gets in and finds me here as I sit in my chair.  I’m thinking about birds.

There is a little space on top of the post at the corner of the back porch.  It’s about 4x4x5 inches high.  I used to keep a set of keys up there but last year some paper wasps built a nest up there and that made it painful to get the keys so I moved them.  The wasps didn’t bother me unless I wanted the keys so I moved the keys.  The wasps didn’t come back this spring and I was thinking about knocking the nest down but on Monday when I stepped out onto the porch I noticed that a bird had built a nest up there.  The wasp nest didn’t seem to bother the bird at all.  It’s a neat little nest made of grass and green moss.  I wondered where the bird who built it got the moss and how many trips it must have taken to bring in all the material.  I reached up and put a finger into the nest.  It was deep and soft and empty.  I’ve been watching for its builder all week but the bird doesn’t seem to be around now.  This makes me wonder what is going on.  On Wednesday morning I was looking at the nest and I wondered if maybe a little boy bird didn’t build this nest seeking a little girl bird.  Sometimes it works that way I guess and maybe that is what happened now but the little girl bird he had his eye on rejected his effort.  Maybe since it was right under a wasp nest and the girl bird saw it and was uncomfortable with having her family under there but the boy bird said “but it’s empty”, but it didn’t matter to the girl bird who would just be to nervous sitting under it anyway.  I could see that happening sometimes the guys don’t think about stuff the way they should.  I bet the boy bird said “Rats”.

On Wednesday afternoon I set my yard on fire.  Well, not the whole thing in the end I guess I burned about an acre.  I was burning some brush and thought everything would be okay but then I looked out the window of the garage where I was working and saw the yard on fire.  I spent the rest of the afternoon watching it burn.  It was a nice fire and was not out of control so I let it burn itself out.  At one point it was getting near a small spruce tree that I didn’t want burned up so I was pulling the dead grass and stuff out from around the tree when I grabbed a handful and came out with a bird nest.  I didn’t even see it there in the grass until it was in my hand.  It was a small nest about the size of an orange.  It was a neat little nest made of long grass all woven together to form a little cup.  It came away all in one piece.  There were about six eggs in it.  They are small about the size of pearl onions, buff colored with some rusty splatters on them.  I looked around to see if I was being watched but couldn’t spot anybody.  I wondered who laid these and why they looked as they did, how is it they come to be just this color, I wonder.  I slipped them back under the little tree.  I kept the fire well away from the tree and hoped the mom who was sitting on them would come back.  Lots of things eat birds, little birds, what a place to build a nest I wonder who it belongs to.  I’ve seen these nests in the grass before when I’m mowing but this is the first one I’ve seen with eggs in it.  On Thursday I walked over and checked on it and there was a song sparrow sitting on it.  She is as brown as the grass around it and was all but invisible.  Later on in the day I was messing around and noticed that the front of the blue bird box was open.  This bird house has a hinged front held in place with a plastic latch so that you can check the nest.  The bluebirds don’t seem to mind an occasional peek but now what I saw was a disaster.  The box had been pulled open and the nest lay empty on the ground.  Dirty rotten raccoons.  I’ve come to regard raccoons as enemy numero uno around here.  They create a lot of trouble and they are absolutely fearless.  I’m pretty sure that God told Noah not to let them on the ark.  “Listen, God said to Noah, I think the raccoons were a bad idea they’ve been nothing but trouble since the day I made them, let’s not take them along for the boat ride and we’ll all be better off in the new world”.  But those pesky raccoons snuck aboard and kept out of sight until the dry land appeared and escaped.  Dirty rotten raccoons. 

Lots of tragedy around here this week.  I guess the birds just go on though they don’t think about what happened, they don’t go sit on a branch and wonder why bad things happen to good birds, they just go on and build another nest and lay some more eggs.  We on the other hand think about things and wonder why and ask God what he’s up to. 

I’m glad I’m not a bird tonight.  They are out there sitting in the bushes trying to keep warm and dry and get through a long miserable night. It’s cold here where I am, but I’m dry and I can get warm.  I’m sitting here wondering about things.  Birds are just birds.  God takes care of them but they don’t ever think about that I don’t suppose they just go from one moment to the next doing what they do.  We’re kind of a mess with all our thinking but what a gift it is to sit here and wonder about stuff that I don’t understand.  Somehow this ability we have to look around and wonder about things can lead us back to God, can lead us into His love.  It’s a long and sometimes very difficult journey but what a gift it is.

Keep lookin up

Bill

Albert Einstein said that. Or something similar anyway, I always thought he said just that and I like that so much I repeat it all the time. Recently I heard that what he said was more like this “We must live as though everything is a miracle or we will live as if nothing is”. I like that to but it’s not the same. I’m not sure now which I like best.

When he was a young man Dr. Einstein had a thought burst in his brain and I think that in a flash of blinding clarity he saw something nobody had ever seen before and in that flash he knew it was true. He spent a number of years then trying to figure out how to prove his theory but I don’t think the truth of it was ever a question in his mind. In that flash of revealed truth he was able to gaze up into the night sky and see the void spread out before him as no one else ever has.

So during spring break I was out in Wyoming visiting my daughter and the rowdy boys that live with her. One of them is Kyle and he is getting along towards three now. I was watching him and playing with him one day and he is so full of wonder it is a wonder. Little kids seem to learn things at the speed of light. They fiddle around with something over and over and the light comes on in that little head and in nothing flat they are light years away. What I want to pass on here is that inside your head, my head, our heads, inside Kyle’s little head is an endless capacity for wonder, for wondering, for learning and discovering things and it all goes on at a speed faster than light – it all happens at the speed of thought. And it is an endless cosmos just like the fabric of space when we look up into the night sky. Infinity is inside us. Infinity is around us. They are different but they are the same. It’s all a wonder.

Either everything is a miracle or nothing is.

Ethan is the youngest of the Grands at two. In the morning I get him up. I lay him on the couch and change his diaper. He is wet and a lot of times his p.js are wet so I get him dressed. This is always a concern for me because I can never find a bib for him and maybe Debbie, his mom, doesn’t use them, I don’t know but a two year old can turn a whole room into a cleanup project so I usually sit with him and we have his breakfast together. He has Eggos in the morning; I like them better than cereal because with cereal there is milk and with milk the shirt is wet. With Eggos there is syrup but it’s easier to control. We use two forks. He has one and I have one and we trade back and forth. We have some long and serious discussions some mornings. I don’t always understand what he is telling me except that the string of words quite often end with a dramatic “Gram- Pa”. Some mornings we just make faces at each other and laugh and that always ends with “Gram-Pa” as well and then I say Bubby and we laugh some more. The other day we started howling at the moon and now we do that pretty often. Okay here is the thing that happens. We are sitting there going through the routine and Ethan will slip his hand into mine. He has kind of little hands and he slips his whole hand into mine and we sit there like that. He does that often with me. If I have him on my lap and we are watching the Cat in the Hat he slips his hand into mine and we sit there. It makes me feel great when he does that. I was thinking of how God must feel when we ask him to help us. That is kind of like slipping our hand into His and I bet He really likes that.

Either everything is a miracle or nothing is. We should live as though that is a miracle.

It’s been a couple weeks now I guess since my granddaughter had her heart procedure. It’s a “procedure” and I don’t like that word. It’s not surgery because they didn’t open her up but they put things inside her and went right into her heart and that is not simply a procedure that is a PROCEDURE. Ashlan in 10 and she has some heart problems from birth. She has been operated on a couple times and it makes you think about stuff when you see your little baby with the scars from open heart surgery. This time the doctors were going to go into her heart and either do a balloon or put in a “stint”. Angioplasty is what the procedure was and the doctors told us that it would be pretty routine – how can that be when you are 10? Well that is what they said and that is how it went they did not have to leave a stint inside her and she should get along real well for some time now. Somewhere down the road, when her heart is adult size she will have the surgery that should make all the repairs she will need for a long and healthy life. Here is the thing: We sat in the consultation room with the heart doctor who had worked on her, he seemed so young to me and looked at the videos of the work they had done. We could see right into her little heart. Right inside her as they worked.

Either everything is a miracle or nothing is. That certainly is.

Marty is six and the oldest of Ben & Kelsey’s three kids. Wednesday night is church night around here. I teach a 7^th grade class in religious education on Wednesday nights and Marty goes to his 1^st grade class. I bring Marty home when it is all over. Sometimes we stop at Hy-Vee and get some egg rolls. Marty likes egg rolls. Marty is not always very neat though and I guess it’s hard to eat an egg roll in a moving vehicle. The egg roll is one thing but the sweet and sour sauce is a whole other thing. It’s this bright red stuff and it’s real sticky and they give you a little cup of it for dipping your egg roll and I don’t know how this works, ask Dr. Einstein, but what is only a couple ounces in a little cup is a gallon in your back seat. So the other night we stopped for an egg roll. We got three one for Marty, one for me and one for Marty’s dad, Marty’s mom was away so she missed out. I gave them to Marty to carry. We got two cups of sauce with them. As soon as he got his hands on them he started giving me orders about what we were going to do next. It got a little annoying. As we were leaving the grocery store and he continues to boss me around I decided I’d had enough and fired a round of my own. I let him know that I thought he was pretty bossy and I didn’t care for it especially since this whole idea was mine and I was the money man in this whole operation. “What makes you think that you can boss me around like you are”? I wanted to know. “Well I can grand pa because I’m a kid and when you are six you can get away with being bossy”, was his reply. “Oh, is that so”. Said I. “Yeah, and beside that I’m training to be a dad someday so I’m supposed to learn how to boss people around”. Look out world. So I sat him down on the car hood and gave him his egg roll and opened the sauce and held it while he got his first couple dips. Then I let him hold it but not before I cautioned him again about being careful not to spill because he can be kind of sloppy I reminded him. He didn’t say anything but I did get a long hard look. So I fished my own egg roll out of the sack and held it with three fingers while I held the other cup of sauce with the other fingers and worked the lid off being very careful not to spill. That all went pretty well until I sat down on the hood beside Marty to enjoy my egg roll, he was about half finished with his. That is when I spilled the sauce on my pants and I thought Marty would fall off the car he was laughing so hard.

Either everything is a miracle or nothing is. We should live as though everything is indeed miraculous

Keep Lookin Up but don’t spill your sauce

Bill

Two years ago, around this time of year I heard this same gospel reading.  The reading made quite an impression on me I guess because it stuck in my mind and kept coming back to me over the weeks that followed.  Perhaps what helped to contribute to this were the Christ our Life posters, one upstairs and one downstairs, which featured an artist’s rendering of the doubting Thomas event.  I purchased a copy of that painting from Divine Treasures book store and you can see it today on the easel in the back of the church.  I couldn’t and still can’t get over the look on Thomas’ face or on Jesus face for that matter as He pokes his finger into the wound in Jesus side. 

This picture and the event that it portrays became for me a subject of much reflection and I found that very often during my prayers I would be thinking about it.  Then over time I made it a part of my prayers by asking God to show me what He would have me know in all this.  I thought abot it often and would refer to it in my prayers as The Wounds of Christ.

I feel like I should make a disclaimer now before I go any farther.  I pray regularly each day as a Deacon I’m supposed to – I’ve promised that I would – and as a person on a faith journey in need of prayer I’ve found that it is essential to my spiritual health.  Prayer is good for us.  For a long time in my life I didn’t pray very much only in desperation but now I do and recommend it to everyone.  While I do pray and I know it is good for me I don’t feel especially holy or anything if I feel anything about all this it would be that I feel a need for more prayer.  I do believe though that God hears our prayers and I think He answers our prayers – one way or another – for me an important part of this is that we can know when God answers our prayers.   Again I don’t feel especially holy about any of this stuff.

Okay so one day as I was saying my prayers and had wandered into thinking about the wounds of Christ I got the feeling that I was being called into the wounds of Christ.  It was disturbing to me because I wasn’t sure what all that meant and I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to go there.  I didn’t like thinking about that and when I did think about it the look on my face was very similar to the look on Thomas’ face in my picture. 

The bus stopped at the edge of the city.  It was the end of the line and we would have to walk from here.  We got off and started walking up the mountain side.  I was with a missionary tour group in Quito Ecuador and we were going to visit a woman who was going to show us her house.  Quito is a big city.  About 2 and a half million people live there.  60% of the residents of the city live below a subsistence level income.  The subsistence level income for a family of 4 is about $500.00 a month.    The bus stopped just outside one of the poorest regions of the city.  I don’t know how much poverty you might have seen but there is nothing around here anything like what I saw in Quito.  I stepped off the bus and looked around and the thought in my head was “this is like a scourging”.  I don’t know where that idea came from but you see razor wire everywhere in the city – it’s to keep people out of your property I’d been looking at that and wondering how it would be to live in place where you had to surround yourself with razor wire and perhaps that is what gave me that idea, I don’t know but wherever it came from seemed appropriate.  We would have to walk about a half mile up the mountain to the house we were visiting and as I started out I thought that this is kind of like the way of the cross.  It was a tough hike, we were at about 10,000 feet and it was hard for me to catch my breath.  I could see the house off in the distance – it was a house to them, the family that lived there – to me it was hardly a shack.  It was about the size of a single car garage sided with ill fitting scraps of wood, boards and pieces of old plywood.  The roof was random sheets of corrugated tin.  There were no windows and only one door – no plumbing and no electric.  The woman in the door was  small and young, dark hair and dark eyes, a broad peaceful face and the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen.  I didn’t want to go there, I didn’t want to get any closer and I didn’t want to go inside the house.  What I was thinking was this is the wounds of Christ – if you go in you will be entering the wound in Jesus side.  I didn’t want to go there but I couldn’t find a good way out so I met this woman and stepped into her house.

I’ve changed I think since my trip to Quito. I’m more aware of the many blessings I’ve been given and I try to share my blessing with those less fortunate.  I support missionary work around the world and here around Des Moines as I can.  I volunteer my time for stuff and I didn’t use to do that.  I can do it and so I do and I think it’s good to give our dollars but I think it’s better to give our time when we are able to.  Because when you give your time you give yourself and the sense of unity with those you serve is greater. 

We are all called into the wounds of Christ for me that call started in prayer and then took me into the house of a poor family in Quito.  For you it might be something else cancer or some other terminal illness, perhaps it will be someone’s drug or alcohol addiction, it could be abortion, unemployment or any of a host of ways that suffering is present in our lives.  A lot of the time we try to avoid these sorts of things and for good reason – they hurt us they challenge us and they change us.  But I think Jesus brings these things to us, finds ways to bring them into our lives, and calls us to enter into the suffering of others and in entering into that He draws us into his life through His wounds.  By His wounds we are healed we just lived that during Holy Week.  It is within His wounds that we become one heart and mind with Him and come to that place where we can hold all things in common.  In psalm 51, one of my favorite psalms, we ask God to create a clean heart in me that change comes to us when we enter the wounds of Christ because our hearts change.  Not long after my trip to Quito I discovered this prayer in the “Breaking Bread” book.  It’s normally said after receiving Communion but I’d like to close with it today.

Anima Christi

Soul of Christ, sanctify me; Body of Christ, save me; Blood of Christ, inebriate me; Passion of Christ, strengthen me; O good Jesus, hear me; Within your wounds hide me; Separated from you; let me never be; From the evil one protect me; at the hour of my death call me; and close to you bid me; That with your saints, I may be, praising you forever and ever Amen.

Jesus is fully God and Fully man.  Human and Divine natures in one being, Jesus is human, a man and his human experience is like no other while he is at the same time God and one in being with the Father.  Jesus as a man is human in a way that we cannot know since Jesus is fully human he is free of sin and one with creation in a way we, who are shackled with the presence of sin in our lives and in our world, cannot know.  I think all of Jesus senses are operating as God intended and so when he sees something – like a flight of geese – he sees them completely in that all his senses are attuned to creation and he is not looking at the world through the veil of sin that distorts the senses as we are.  As man He sees the world as the Father creates it while as God he sees it as one in being with the Father.  And yet one nature does not interfere with the other.  They are in harmony.  How can that be?  It’s a mystery.

Jesus is 33 years old at the time of his crucifixion.  As a man he is in his prime I think.  I was thinking about this being in the prime of life. I was remembering different times in my life when I was so intensely aware of the world around me.  When we are teenagers and our bodies are going through so many changes we experience the senses in ways different than at any other time in our lives.  Our taste, smell, hearing and seeing are so sensitive while at the same times we are such a rage of hormones we hardly know what to do with ourselves.    I’ve always been a blue collar sort of guy.  There has always been a fair amount of physical labor involved in any of the work I’ve ever done.  As a teenager and young adult I was resistant to all the physical energy it took to get something done.  At first work is drudgery then it becomes simply hard then it is a challenge and then you become its master.  I remember when that happened, when I felt like I could do anything, when I could hold my own with anybody and when there was no job beyond me.  I remember how great it felt to meet the test and tasting the triumph of a hard job of work finished.  That is where Jesus was in his humanness on the night he was arrested.  In his prime.  

It doesn’t last long though, not nearly enough, a few years maybe 10 or 15 if you are really lucky and then it isn’t enough to be simply more fit than the work – the work begins to work you over.  What happens then is that you have to be smarter than the work and the older you get the smarter you have to work because the body while it is willing is wearing out.  Anybody who thinks that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks has never had to work by the sweat of his brow because an old dog that doesn’t learn new tricks will soon be a dead dog.  So as the body wears out the brain takes over and you learn to work smarter.  And that is its own good feeling that you are old but still able.  Little by little though the work of living takes its toll on us and we feel in lots of ways the work we’ve done, the living and what it has cost us.  We don’t come back so fast.  After a day of hard labor, after a night’s rest, we’re still kind of stove up – just can’t get the kinks out until we work for a couple hours and kind of loosen up.  The fingers are stiff more often and for longer.  The back aches and it’s hard to get up sometimes – there is that place where it just catches in your back and makes you kind of shuffle until you get straightened out.  The knees ache, steps are harder and you use the hand rail more.  Your feet hurt and it feels so good to get your boots off now – it didn’t used to be like that.  Your neck gets stiff and aches and then it hurts your back and you just can’t loosen up like you used to.  Sometimes you stumble and when you look there is nothing there you just stumble.  Sometimes you have an ache that just won’t go away.  We have hurts that won’t let go, won’t quite heal up.  And we get older and a day comes when we just don’t want to go anymore and then some more times passes and we get older until that day when we just can’t go anymore.  We’re past our prime.

I’ve been thinking about that this week as I’ve been thinking about the wounds of Christ.  I’ve been thinking about Jesus the man – in his prime – and this journey he is on – this Way of the Cross.  I’ve been thinking about the wounds we all know but the ones we can’t see.  The ones that come from living the journey we are on.

Food for the Journey

It came into my head about the sacrament of the sick.  The priest administers this sacrament – it might heal us, we might not die, so they don’t call it the Last Rites anymore because that might scare us to death but we will receive the Eucharist as a part of this sacrament.  It’s called Viaticum or “food for the journey”.  As I’ve been thinking about Jesus and His crucifixion.  I wonder if His arrest, His beatings and scourging and abuse are viaticum or food for His journey. 

It’s not far, the courtyard where he is scourged to Golgotha.  It is the journey of a lifetime.  A long road full of living, an eternity of living, Jesus lives our eternity in this journey from the courtyard to the cross.  He is willing.  He accepts the weight of the cross across his shoulders – on His back.  Jesus the man, as this crushing weight of our sinfulness comes to him, must gasp and buckle under its weight coming.  How can I carry this?  Each step is a stagger.  Who can count the steps?  Our lives are there laid out before Him.  Each of us our whole lives are there in the way of the cross all of our sins all of our transgressions and He staggers, stumbles and falls.  The weight shifts, an ankle turns, a knee buckles and down He goes as His knee crashes on the cobbles, He falls and turns as the beam shifts and slips  and wrenches his shoulder He comes down on His hipbone and the pain is blinding – a flash of light behind His eyes, the beam strikes the stones and He loses His grip, His hand comes down on the stones bruising His palm and then the beam drops across it, He falls on down hitting His head on the wood of His cross and crashes finally in a heap on the street.  Jesus falls the first time.  His breathing is labored there is no comfort here on the ground as He is poked and prodded to get up but no hand is extended to help Him up.  Jesus is fully human and free from sin as He stumbles under the weight of our sins.  And so He struggles to His feet and goes on, moves on, on this journey into eternity. 

We see pictures of the risen Christ and we see the marks of the nails in His hands and feet, we see the wound in His side, wounds on His head from the thorns but what of the wounds we don’t see?  Falling, crushing, spraining, wrenching wounds in His body wrecking Him and he will fall again and again and how is it that He gets up?  Why does He get up?  Why not just stay down?  He is beaten but not defeated.  Damaged but not destroyed and as He lies there on the ground He should stay down but He will not He gets up and in triumph He moves on to meet His Maker.

Good Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner in great need of your mercy.  I am weak and stubborn and not worthy to be called your son.  Have mercy on me, Lord. 

I’ve been looking back over my life and seeing how time has left its marks on me.  Life is a great gift, grace upon grace, but it is no easy gig and it takes a toll on each of us as we make our way through it.  Whatever we think, however much we except it, we travel through this world, this life we’ve been given and in the final analysis it’s a faith journey.  We suffer for our sins but without Jesus we would still be waiting for our salvation.  It’s a long old haul and we’re not – none of us – very good at it.  I’ve been looking at my own walk in the woods and seeing how difficult it is and that is just one guy trying to get through this time I’m given and I can’t even manage that. 

Jesus sets off on the way of the cross and perhaps it is not all that different then our own journey.  Living wounds us.  I see back over the years how the hurts take their toll on us – what a risky business being human is.  I can’t imagine how Jesus takes up His cross and sets out for Golgotha and take all of us with Him.  Our sins are His sins He suffers for all of us. 

It’s too big for me.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus have mercy on me.  Jesus, Jesus, Jesus – forgive me.

Keep Lookin Up

Bill